I revisited the defensive MLEs recently. The biggest change was for the catchers. Two examples are Adam Moore, who might wind up starting in Seattle, and Jesus Montero, one of the best long term prospects in the game. Moore goes from -14 to -9, Montero from -21 to -16. I may post more on this later. I started a longer post, but I'm not sure it's coherent enough, and it's getting late.

The 3rd place system, Oliver, is available to THT subscribers. Why would anyone pay money for projections that were less accurate last year than what you can get on this site for free? Well, I actually have an answer for you, and I do recomment buying them.

One is the player comments. They were not written by a small staff of writers who may or may not even watch all the teams they were assigned, they were written by 30 bloggers who follow the teams. And they will be updated as the 2010 season unfolds.

Another reason is the number of players projected - I've only got 2500-3000 players who at least played in AA last year. Oliver has players from the low minors, and even uses college stats in the projections.

One thing I noticed with the pitch f/x data for 2009, just about every pitch thrown by Tim Wakefield was classified as a knuckleball. That can't be right, I thought he threw in a batting practice fastball every now and then. The data on Fangraphs shows this is true, he threw the fastball about 10% of the time.

I think the difference here is Fangraphs is using BIS data, which is, last I checked, compiled by scorers watching the game where MLBAM uses an automated pitch classification algorythm. The knuckleball apparently is as hard to measure as it is to hit, or to catch. The formula probably leans heavy on the velocity and doesn't want to call what Wakefield throws a fastball.

Here are the numbers I have projected to the ends of their careers. I'll be discussing these Sunday morning at 9:45 Eastern time, on WFAN Talking Baseball with Ed Randall. Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus will also be on the show.